Committee of Union and Progress

The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) was a political party of the Ottoman Empire founded in 1889 and dissolved in 1918, being affiliated with the Young Turks. It called for democratization and reform in the empire, and in 1908 the Young Turk Revolution brought them to power; the 1913 Raid on the Sublime Porte ended the Ottoman Empire's rule by their rival Young Turk party, the Freedom and Accord Party, and the "Three Pashas" Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Djemal Pasha were the de facto rulers of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The CUP eventually developed nationalist ideals after the Balkan Wars angered the Turkish people, and the group exterminated Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in the empire during the war in the 1910s. After the war, many of the CUP leaders were court-martialled, fled into exile (where many would be killed by survivors of the Armenian Genocide), or were executed for their failed attempt to assassinate Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.